I imagine they felt a little like this in March, 1727. Issac Newton had died, and the world was left to wonder: Who will explain the universe to us now?

Stephen Hawking has left us at the age of 76—roughly a half-century after they said he should have died, having been diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease) while still a young and impossibly brilliant scholar and thinker.

The progression of his ailment, and the ways he coped with it, is an inextricable part of his story. The ‘robot voice’ that most of the world knew him by—cutting edge technology when it was created, viewed as a necessity because here was a man who needed to communicate with us—became his voice; the novelty of it passed and we stopped noticing it, really. Because the things he said (and wrote) were far more fascinating, and immediate, and vital.

His most pioneering work was in the area of black holes—odd, incomprehensible entities that were entirely hypothetical in the Einstein era. Thanks to Stephen Hawking we “see” them (after a fashion), we measure them, and we know they lie at the heart of almost every galaxy, including our own. There’s an old story, possibly apocryphal but somehow I don’t think so, of some unnamed physicist, upon learning of Hawking’s posited method for detecting black holes, tearing through his department and shouting to his colleagues, “Did you hear? Stephen has changed everything!”

And so he did. He found a universe of equations and mystery and occultation, he grasped it, and somehow managed to delineate it to us all. He was perhaps the greatest explorer of our age: sitting quite still, he voyaged to dimensions no one else could have imagined, he mapped them, and brought back for us their proofs and artifacts.

If ever a hero has earned his rest, it’s this one. But still, not without a great deal of unabashed selfishness, I can’t help thinking: Who will explain the universe to us now?

We’re not supposed to try to valuate the intangibles of culture. Except, you know, we’re a people who valuate everything.

So let’s do this. According to new research just released by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (nonpartisan and apolitical entities both), the arts and culture segment contributes nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars—$763.6 billion, to be exact—to the U.S. GDP. Every damn year.

That’s almost 5% of our economy. It’s just short of the impact from the food and agriculture industries. It’s more than the entire GDP of Switzerland.

So there’s your proof. Your patronage of the arts, in whatever form and measure that suits you best, is a valuable economic engine for the common good. Buy art!

My euphemisms vary: sometimes I say I prefer having my art collection with me at all times. Sometimes (when I’m feeling a little more honest) I allow as how I’m wearing my mid-life crisis on my skin.

Either way, once or twice a year I feel inclined to sit still for a couple hours and receive the inky needles…as similarly inclined folk have been doing for ten or twenty thousand years.

Motivations for doing so also vary, well nigh to the gamut stratum. Anthropologists might tell you that traditional tattooing is a rite of passage, and a mark of tribal inclusion. I’m sure they’re right on some level, but human impulse mirrors the human dermis: multi-layered, and more opaque the deeper you go.

So those traditional tattooees surely had a multitude of reasons, like me, for their voluntary body modification. I consider myself well past the sell-by date for rites of passage; and as for my tribe, good people that they are, they’re plenty inclusive without heed of outward appearances.

I’d struggle, then, to tell you exactly why I choose to be tattooed. I’ve on occasion done it to mark some special milestone, but then again I’ve gone through plenty of milestones without ink…and I’ve been inked plenty of times with no milestones associated at all.

Yesterday I met up with the merry artisans at Arkham Tattoo, and was pleased and honored to receive the ministrations of the proprietor, Eric Starr. Eric’s artistic chops are legendary (don’t take my word for it, go see for yourself), but perhaps more importantly from where I was sitting (speaking quite literally here), Eric’s an epic conversationalist.

So over the hour or so it took to implant this most recent masterpiece, Eric and I had a wide-rangingdiscussion—much of it tattoo-centric, since as I duly warned him, I was of a mind to write about it. Eric kindly schooled me on the history of tattooing technology (turns out the first patented electric tattoo machine was more or less stolen from Thomas Edison—which if you know your Edison history is some sweet karmic justice).

We talked about the pain of the process. I was surprised to learn it’s rarely an issue, even with first timers. “People know what to expect,” Eric told me. In fact, he said, it usually goes in the other direction: it hurts less than people anticipate. “If it was that heinous we wouldn’t have kept it up for the last five thousand years.”

I asked him what he’d like first timers to know before they come in the shop, and his answer was downright fascinating. “They should know what they want,” he said. I thought I understood what he meant, but it soon became clear that this, too, was deep and stratified.

He explained that a lot of the difficulty has started with the 21st-century effusion of tattoo-shop reality shows. “A true reality show about a tattoo shop would be the most boring thing on TV,” he declared. The broadcast versions are spiced up, it seems, by pairing a story with every tattoo. And it’s all well and good that an ink piece should have personal meaning—that’s ideal, in fact. But it’s incumbent upon the customer, not the artist, to choose what sort of image best marks the fifth anniversary of Papaw’s passing, or whatever.

The upshot has been a cohort of seekers weaned on these shows, with their expectations crafted accordingly. If one of them is a cancer survivor, bless ‘em, they come into the shop expecting to be shown a selection of ‘cancer-survivor tattoos.’

That just ain’t how it works, people.

Whatever your motivation, whatever brought you to that chair, you’re the one who’ll be wearing the art for life. Come with an image in mind, bring a sample or a vivid description, or go ahead and choose a bit of flash off the wall. But in any case, understand that you’ll be owning it, solely and ever and always. The choice is entirely yours. As Eric writes in an insightful essay on this very subject, “I am not a Priest, Reverend, Deacon, Monk, Shaman, Healer, Counselor, Psychiatrist, Psychologist…or a Hairdresser or Bartender.” Pros like Eric want to work with you collaboratively to create something you’ll be overjoyed with, but they can’t carry the load alone.

Just as importantly, though, remember that it is a collaboration. Your tattooer is graced with not just talent, but also experience. They understand how your flat printed image will translate onto the contours of your body, and they know how it’s likely to change over the long years ahead of you. Avail yourself of that experience, and if your artist tells you that what you have in mind is inadvisable, by all means listen. Every tattoo I get starts with pretty much precisely these words: “Here’s what I’m thinking, tell me if this’ll work…”.

Having thought it over, I still can’t tell you exactly what brought me to Eric’s chair yesterday. Maybe I was just ready for another one, but that doesn’t at all diminish the depth of meaning to it. He and I created something, it’s here on me right now, and here it’ll remain even after the last light that is me blinks out. If that’s not meaning, I don’t know what is. The only other thing I’m sure of is that some day, possibly one relatively soon, I’ll get that undefinable itch yet again. And Eric will hear me say, “Tell me if this’ll work…”.

Fast on the heels of our discussion late last month with esteemed cave-art expert and paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger, we check back in on this fascinating subject, based on ground-breaking revelations. Just published yesterday, new research on cave art in Spain identifies what is now understood to be the world’s oldest cave painting, pictured here. Previous record-holding specimens were thought to date from about 40,000 years before present. A relatively new process (uranium-thorium dating) suggests this red-pigmented design was created at least 65,000 years ago.

What’s particularly notable about that timeline is that modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) are believed to have arrived in Europe only 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. So if the dating is correct, then the earliest cave art was created by some species other than humans.

The primary candidate is H. neanderthalensis, or the Neanderthal, which was dominant in Europe prior to human arrival, and whose use of art and abstract expression in other contexts has been well documented. It’s important to note, though, that researchers are at present relying mainly on U-Th dating to connect these sites with Neanderthals. More study, and recovery of more in situ artifacts are needed for confirmation.

Not at all surprisingly, Genevieve relays all of this much better than I ever could, on her brand-spanking-new Vlog—so go check it out.

Hats off to artists Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley for their ground-breaking portraits of, respectively, Michelle and Barack Obama, unveiled this week and added to the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery. These inspiring works will forever change how we see and remember iconic national figures.

Longtime repeat visitors to this space have probably noticed the ambivalent attitude we at Decon Central have toward pro sports in general, and in particular toward the American bacchanalia that is the Super Bowl.

Opinions vary, and this probably puts us in the minority, but we find little more than the spectacle itself appealing. Football is engaging, fun to watch, but nagging background concerns—concussions, drugs, domestic violence—are tempering forces. This and the perennial awfulness of our hometown squad make it all but impossible to pay anything except the most cursory of attention to the regular season, and most of the playoffs.

But then comes the day of the Big Game, the national sport high holy day, and our attention is drawn whether we want it to be or not. Still and all, it was largely undecided until about 36 hours ago whether we’d even watch the game.

What did it was driving by a nearby Very Conservative Drinking Establishment. The kind that Don’t Like Our Kind. Never been inside, but the frequently updated letterboard marquee has always thoroughly telegraphed the managements’ social leanings (how they must be missing that Kenyan Muslim gun-taker). Now their message is simple and succinct, to the point that they couldn’t even misspell any part of it:

The NFL Sucks.

Oh yeah, that. The temerity of taking a knee. The audacity of athletes expressing an unpopular opinion. A certain segment of these United States is turning its back on pro football, and that’s enough for some of us to tune in. So we’re watching the Super Bowl out of pure lefty contrarianism.

Bonus: we’ll get the rest of it. Beer and wings and pizza rolls, wacky commercials and over-the-top hype. And maybe we’ll get some decent football to boot.

One of the most important unifying threads in art, in any art, is that of connection. It is that momentary removal of time and distance between observer and creator, when they become of one mind. Intent is key here, and the phenomenon applies to even the most abstract work—if the audience can discern the thought that spurred the creativity, then the connection is made.

The question then becomes, how long and across how many cultural barriers can such a connection endure? Art is among humanity’s defining characteristics; it seems to have always been that way, with the imperative for conceptual self-expression being a constant, evidently, right down the millennia. We have glimpses of these expressions, on the walls of caves and in carefully unearthed fragments of pottery, from ancestors about whom we know almost nothing. So in viewing that which they have left for us, can we connect with them?

In some ways—perhaps. The art they’ve left us is rich in variety, and surely, in talent. But in many cases the common ground is simply lacking for us to make that contextual connection. We can appreciate a cave drawing of the now-extinct aurochs, maybe, but we can never really understand the frame of reference. Is it a hunting fetish, or an affectionate portrait? Did they fear the beast, or adore it?

There is, however, an exceedingly common cave-wall motif that spurs almost spontaneous connection: the hand prints. They’re ubiquitous among prehistoric sites right across the world, and across unimaginable spans of time. They’re instantly familiar—they remind us of what for many of us was our own earliest artistic expression. And throughout the rest of our lives, when we want to leave behind some personal signifier, a permanent wave, as it were, we leave some image of our hands.

Is that what’s going on in the caves? Is that what our ancestors were trying to say?

Genevieve is cautious, understandably enough, about trying to speculate as to the mindset of people who are, by definition, unknowable. But when I asked if we can conjecture that the ancient hand representations were personal declarations, a kind of ancient “Kilroy was here,” she kindly and gamely went out on that limb with me.

“The straightest answer I could give you would be that they seem to have meant different things in different times and places,” she wrote to me. “In South Africa the local rock artists make them on cave walls in places where the membrane between worlds is thought to be especially thin, so in some European contexts it’s entirely possible they were also part of some sort of shamanistic ritual. In other places they seem to have been identity marks as you suggested, and the “mutilated hands” (which really were intact hands with different fingers curled under) almost have the look of a hand sign language to them.

“So how’s that for three different possibilities right there?”

Genevieve told me of sites that include the hands of children as well as male and female adults, suggesting that leaving these marks held deep significance for entire groups. She also posited that in some places and times they might have been ownership marks, staking claims to not just the caves but the entire surrounding territories.

The interesting thing, to me, is that all of these possibilities ring both true and familiar. They are motives we can understand, even identify with. It’s true that we’ll never know with a degree of certainty which ancient artist left his hand-mark for which particular reason. But it’s likewise true that I can’t be certain of what drove Van Gogh. I think I know, and that seems to be enough for his art to connect with me. In the same way, I think I understand why, 32,500 years ago someone stood by flickering torchlight, placed their hand as a stencil on a cool rock wall, and spat pigment all around it. I think I understand what drives that act of creation.

Pro forma apologies to any committed partisans in the audience, but I’m firmly convinced that the advent of political parties in general, and our sycophantic two-party system in particular, has brought about the incremental ruination of the great American experiment in representational democracy.

It’s not like we weren’t warned.

No less an OG insider than George Washington spoke at length on the subject on the occasion of his retirement from government. I hold the good general in esteem, but without gloss. He was a slave owner—when he governed from New York he was known to rotate his slaves back to Virginia after about 11 months to prevent them from benefiting from a free-after-a-year state law. He was not, clearly, without his cultural warts, and we do ourselves no historical favors by ignoring these. But he could have been king; no one would have stopped him, indeed his fledgling nation would have tripped over itself rushing to crown him. He demurred. So his thoughts on politics and good governance are perhaps worth heeding.

His farewell speech was, in its entirety, a warning against political parties (he was never a member of one, and his two terms remain our nation’s only independent, non-partisan administration). Here’s a taste of that speech:

“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

Sound a little familiar?

Despite the stranglehold the two parties currently enjoy, a slim majority of Americans pledge allegiance to neither. A slim majority of Americans also, as a matter of habit, do not vote. Correlation might not be causation, but then again sometimes it is. Independent voters (or non-voters, as the case may be), might skew left or right, in the general direction of one party platform or another, but they shouldn’t kid themselves. The parties’ primary (and secondary, tertiary, etc. etc.) ideology is power. Allegiance is no two-way street. Want proof? Read the news (start here and here).

It’s all a bit discouraging, as evidenced by that aforementioned non-voting trend, but I urge my fellow citizens to 1) take heart, and 2) VOTE. It’s one of the last morsels of sovereignty left to us, and it’s the only one they fear.

Now, don’t think I don’t recognize (and disdain) the inherent paradox. When an anti-partisan votes, he or she will almost certainly be voting for, at some place up or down the ballot, a member or members of one of those suspect parties. True enough, and nearly avoidable. For now. Remember though that the independent movement, though small, is growing. More and more non-affiliated candidates can and will run. Remember also that some candidates, even with a nominal D or R after their names, might truly choose to serve their people above their party—so do your research.

Finally, remember that in absence of a candidate, a slate, or a platform you can support (or vote against, as appropriate), you can always choose to be an issue voter.

They’re not as common as you might think. Some notableorganizations have sprung up around particular issues, but they as a matter of course have captured, or been captured by, the political parties with which they’re seemingly most aligned. The result has been that voters who might seek to engage with just those issues found themselves supporting a party, whether they intended to or not.

So beware and choose wisely. And if I might be so bold let me recommend what is perhaps the most portentous issue: the environment. Think if you will that environmental consciousness is the purview of one specific political bent—to some extent that’s true. It needn’t be, though. Conservation was born from conservatism, and in any case planetary survival should be as about a non-partisan concern as one could imagine. Your ideological leanings do not mitigate your need for potable water, for breathable air, for a livable climate.

Let me be one whit bolder, even, and point you toward some fellow travelers: The Environmental Voter Project is a non-aligned movement seeking to mobilize a vast cadre of concerned citizens, and turn them into a bloc bent on saving the earth. No small goal, that, but relevant polling has been encouraging. There’s reason to believe that environmentally conscious Americans, if they show up to vote, can easily tip the next election.

Notice and heed the caveat, and vote-vote-vote. We can break the American deathgrip of partisan inequity; and, just maybe, we can start healing the planet. There’s a lot each of us can do toward both those ends, and we’re each perhaps responsible for exploring the possibilities. But there’s one indisputable duty, one that no citizen should in good conscience ignore. Please, please vote.

The eastern hemlock was once one of the most ubiquitous conifers on this continent. By 2030 it will likely be gone forever. Sometime in the 1950s an invasive parasitic insect, the hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA), was accidentally imported from east Asia, probably Japan. The aphid-like adelgid has no natural predators in the Americas, and hemlocks and spruces here have no resistance to it. For half a century only cold weather checked its spread, however a warming climate has brought an east-coast explosion of the pest. In 2009 the HWA reached New England, the primary range for the eastern hemlock. Existent stands of this stately evergreen have been decimated, and hopes for its recovery and survival are dim at best.

Sometimes all you can do is say goodbye.

Harvard Forest is a 3,000-acre research preserve operated by the university, and located near Petersham, Massachusetts. It is home—for now—of one of the largest surviving stands of eastern hemlocks, although these too are under sustained attack by the HWA. In an effort to educate the public about species loss, and to also offer a somber salute to a dying friend, Harvard Forest is hosting Hemlock Hospice, an art and science collaboration focusing on this slow-motion ecological disaster.

Created by artist David Buckley Borden and ecologist Aaron Ellison, the installation consists of 18 deeply symbolic naturalistic sculptures, situated throughout the forest and intrinsic with both dead and living eastern hemlocks. These are augmented with educational kiosks describing the storied past and mournful fate of this tree, and the broader ecology that exists with and around it.

Hemlock Hospice is an open-air, self-guided installation, and is scheduled to run through November, 2018. The Sixth Great Extinction, meanwhile, presses on.

All due respect to Oprah, but haven’t we learned a little bit about the fitness of media personalities for high(est) office?

Assuming the underneath of your rock receives decent broadcast signals, you probably know that Oprah Winfrey accepted the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award during the Sunday, January 7th Golden Globe awards. Her acceptance speech was met with paroxysms of coastal joy, leading to swift and sure talk of presidential aspirations. Oprah says she’s interested. #Oprah2020 is trending. An early coronation like this can be enough to shut down the party primary process altogether.

Don’t get me wrong. Oprah Winfrey is intelligent and capable, and at the tops of her industry for good and plentiful reasons. For our first woman president, we could do far worse. For our second TV star turned president, well, we have done far worse. So no, I don’t think Oprah would be anything like a trainwreck.

But what she wouldn’t be is as well versed in policy, law, foreign relations, military matters, and the thousand other minutiae that our next president needs to be steeped in from day one.

We cannot afford another president with a learning curve.

Unfortunately what we seem to be seeing here is the moneyed elite of the American left—possibly with nothing but the best intentions—falling into another self-inflicted, election-losing trap. They’re cheer-leading themselves, and each other, and assuming that the rest of the country is inclined to join their pep rally. Most damning, they’re committing the cardinal electoral sin of not being serious.

Times have never been more serious. The interim between now and November 2020 won’t get any less so. We’ll need serious solutions from serious candidates. If we’re stuck with this insult of a two-party system, and I suppose that for now we are, then we need an opposition party that mobilizes ideas, ideals, knowledge, and fortitude. We need an opposition party that can and will fix what’s wrong with our nation and our society.

If they’re instead glomming onto the first famous face willing to run? What exactly is that in opposition to?

In the small amount of informal surveying I’ve done (friends and family, mostly; so perhaps not a representative demographic but surely an awesome one), I’ve found that most of us don’t muck about with New Years resolutions.

And perhaps there’s reasonable justification for that. Maybe there’s a feeling of artificiality, or maybe even self-sabotage, in designating this one wintry season as the time to stop doing this, or lose a few pounds of that. Some of us might feel that self-improvement, in whatever form, needs to be a year-round endeavor, and that focusing on it only when the calendar ticks over is at best merely dabbling in personal transformation, and a willful delusion at worst.

Again, maybe. But to those friends I’d respectfully point to the histories of every culture, of all of our ancestors. The ringing-in of a new year has always been a time for reflection—for a tallying up of the pluses and naughts of the year past, and of the charting out of a better way for the year to come.

And it can be argued that there’s never been a more needful time for that kind of reflection and adjustment. Anno dead-to-me2017 was objectively awful, and I feel safe in declaring that I’m not the only one who thinks so. Something has happened over the last 12 months that seemed to inject into us all a junkie-sized dose of anger and unease. It seems to cut across all boundaries—even the zero-sum winners in the political and economic spheres appear unable to enjoy the fruits of their victories. They too are as pent up with this unnamed apprehension as the rest of us.

I fear this is a recipe for disaster. I fear this is how societies begin tearing themselves apart.

You might call it naive to think that a banal tradition like new years resolutions could have any impact on that, and maybe you’d be right. But I have to hold on to some related suppositions: That we haven’t gone off the rails so far that we can’t find our way back. That all of us, collectively and individually, have both the ability and responsibility to make that effort. And that we’re best positioned to do so when we’re living our best possible lives.

So if it helps, don’t bother calling it a resolution for the new year. And maybe don’t get so granular with the prescriptions and proscriptions. It could just be a matter of striving to do better, to feel better, to try your best. Those are highly personal, individualized programs, but if I might generalize, I can offer a few suggestions. Be less sedentary, be more active. Strenuous exercise is of course off the menu for some of us, and all of us have some limitation or other. But all of us can do something. So push yourself, a little. Get your heart rate up, and generate a bit of sweat. Next week, generate a bit more.

Expand your mind. Learn something new. You have at your disposal unimaginable resources for self-driven education, so by all means, use them. Educate yourself about something that compels you, that fascinates you. Then educate yourself about something that’s dry and boring, but vital for the future of our people.

And relax, recharge, and rejuvenate. Do so often. Breathe. Meditate. If “meditation” sounds too tie-dyed and new-agey for you, then call it something else; it’s nothing more than your well-deserved and thoroughly necessary quiet time, for the purposes of getting your shit in order. So attend to that.

At midnight, 2017 will be behind us. There’s no reason to think 2018 is going to be all that better, but then again, there’s also no reason it can’t be. And it will be, if we choose to make it so. If we resolve to make it so, you might say.

At the time it sure felt like 2016 was the culmination of the old “May you live in interesting times” hex. But just as the new climate-change normal leads us to designate each year as the hottest on record—but only until the next one—this waning 2017 is well on track to ante-up the 2016-level of awfulness we thought we knew so well.

The ways in which this is true are almost too exhausting to enumerate, but let’s start with the culture wars, which have scorched the earth more completely than ever this year. With the Trumpian brand of conservatism seemingly triumphant, the cultural warriors that count themselves as the MAGA rank-and-file have felt emboldened to roll back not just the agents and elements of social progress, but the very clock itself. Welcome to neo-nazi yesteryear.

The irony is that the kleptocrats at the apex of this treasonous pyramid do not, near as I can tell, care one whit about social issues, or even about traditionally defined conservatism. The do care about power, and its attendant keys to the national treasury. They’ll hold the former and plunder the latter by way of a culture war, and through the agency of the self-deceiving crypto-conservatives who believe that a Supreme Court seat, and a regressive Department of Education, and state-sanctioned religious intolerance, and a thousand other culture-war battlefronts—are all worth the price of a Trump presidency.

That’s more than an assault on democracy, it’s an assault on reason; and pity though we might the slow-counters who’ve run that math and somehow came away liking the numbers, what we cannot afford to do is offer them any quarter.

So resist, my friends. Let 2017 be remembered as the year we began resisting at every turn.

The overarching goal is to put an end to this illegitimate regime and see its architects frog-marched into the cells they’ve so thoroughly earned. That’s a long, heavy lift; I’m not sure how long it’ll take or how successful or satisfying its outcome will be. But that’s the prize upon which we’ll keep our eyes.

In the meantime, though, let’s not shrink from more modest goals. Let’s do everything we can to fight the culture war everywhere, all the time. Let’s get creative in that respect.

I hold up as inspiration the city of Memphis: like much of the south this city hosts an inordinate number of Confederate war memorials—not, for the most part, erected in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, but mostly dating from the latter half of the 20th century. They were a slap in the face, in other words, to the Civil Rights movement.

Recognizing them for the civic embarrassments they are, Memphis has been trying for years to decommission them. The city has been stymied, though, by a 2013 Tennessee state law that prohibits the “removal, relocation, or renaming” of statues, monuments, or memorials located on public lands.

Over the last several weeks, Memphis has transferred the ownership of several city parks—ones in which particularly egregious Confederate statuary are sited—to a non-profit, non-governmental entity that was created specifically for this purpose. That non-profit has been busily hauling down the racist monuments and carting them away.

You can almost hear the neo-Confederates howling.

Trump will undoubtedly howl too, although as noted it’s highly unlikely that this Queens, NY land developer and reality-show host really cares all that much about southern culture and heritage. His legions (30% and dwindling) do care, though, so he has to seem to care as well. He’ll howl, they’ll howl…and we’ll howl right back.

That’s how this war will be fought, folks. It’ll be slow and unseemly, and the bad guys will occasionally win.

That doesn’t change the imperative. In a war with these stakes, there’s no battle—not one—not worth fighting.

The photo to the left was captured last week by Jason Stellios of Essex, near a Banksy-sponsored project which is said to mark the anniversary of the creation of the modern state of Israel. Stellios says that at the time he didn’t recognize much significance in the picture he took—just another cargo-shorts-wearing, middle-aged stencil spray-painter. But in the following days, when he learned that the grotto-artwork (“Peace on Earth *terms and conditions apply”) now features prominently on the landing page of Banksy’s website, it occurred to him that he might have captured something extraordinary.

W

Well, maybe. But Banksy has been notably adept to date at avoiding identification. Should we believe that one lucky tourist put an end to that, in broad daylight, with the man of mystery himself glancing furtively over his shoulder and looking for all the world like Anthony Bourdain starring in a spy-spoof? Say it ain’t so, Banksy. Say it ain’t so.

Given recent cultural shockwaves around the eternally fraught subject of sexual politics, no one should be terribly surprised that a painting which appears to depict a suggestively posed prepubescent girl is now in the spotlight, and in the cross-hairs.

Those cross-hairs take the form of a popular petition, around 8,000 signatures strong, presented this week to New York’s Metropolitan Museum. The target is Thérèse Dreaming, a 1938 work by French-Polish modernist painter Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola).

Balthus’ work is perhaps deserving of such scrutiny—he had a reputation for unsavory representation of young females (his earlier work The Guitar Lesson is far more questionable—and be warned that link is decidedly NSFW).

Artist’s intentions aside, we should ask ourselves whether potential objectification is, or should be, within the mind of the beholder. One interpretation could be that Thérèse is simply dreaming, or daydreaming; her innocence and lack of self-consciousness has eased her into a physical arrangement that others might sexualize, but for her is just the wholeness of the here and now. Balthus and others of malicious orientation might attempt to overlay their perversions on children, and I fully agree we should protect them from that. But I think we do them a disservice if that protection comes at the cost of their innocence and agency. Let a kid be a kid, in other words.

In any case, and possibly because the petition itself was rather ambiguous (its title included the phrase “Remove Balthus’ Suggestive Painting,” but the text contradicted that, and merely called for The Met to “more carefully vet” its collection), the museum declined to take action. Specifically, The Met confirmed that the painting will remain on display, and welcomes the conversation it has sparked.

Which, I assert, is a pretty admirable position. Art should challenge, and we need to talk about those challenges. Yes, the exploitation of vulnerable populations is reprehensible, all the more so because it’s been done with impunity for most of human history. We’re at a watershed moment where that impunity is being knocked back on its heels. But is there risk of overreach? And might that overreach include artistic censorship?

Hard questions, with no easy answers. And that’s why we need to talk it through.